Top, left: Alex Vatanka; right: Nazee Moinian; Bottom: Hamidreza Azizi

 

Middle East Institute Spotlights Iran on the Brink as US Aircraft Carriers Head to the Region

By Elaine Pasquini

  

Washington, DC: Nazee Moinian, associate fellow at the Middle East Institute, hosted Alex Vatanka, founding director of Iranian studies at the Institute, and Hamidreza Azizi, visiting fellow at Berlin’s German Institute for International Security Studies, on February 3, 2026, to discuss Iran’s domestic and foreign crises.

Following the recent mass protests in Iran that left thousands dead by the government’s horrific crackdown, Vatanka noted he hadn’t seen this regime so fearful about its own future in the past 20 years. “This is their fight for survival,” he said. “The pro-Khamenei side has said this fight has to be one where the United States will learn that going after Iran will cost dearly.”

Asked whether Iran’s threat of a regional war was the reason Gulf states have not expressed overt or covert support for the American military forces and are pushing for a diplomatic offramp, or whether they actually prefer the status quo of having an Islamic regime on their borders that they know rather than something that is unknown, Vatanka said their neighbors have “learned to live with this Islamic Republic that essentially has been a bad actor in its behavior.”

“The Gulf states don’t necessarily like the Islamic Republic for its policies, but they fear collapse of a central government of some 90 million people on their doorstop and what would come after,” he emphasized.

Leaders in the region believe the Americans see an Iran that is weak and that now is the time of getting a better nuclear deal, he said, noting the main issue for the US has been the Iranian nuclear program. “Nation-building projects and promotion of democracy ended for the US after its involvement in Iraq. The issue hasn’t really moved beyond what the US cares about which is the nuclear program and, linked to that, Iran’s position on Israel, and Iran’s ability to reach Israel with the arsenals of missiles it has.”

Within the context of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, “… the protesters don’t matter much,” he lamented, also pointing out that 70 percent of the younger generation of Iranians taking part in protests in Iran were born after the 1979 revolution.

In addition, in terms of Iran’s nuclear status, the ballistic missiles are all the Iranians have left, and they probably won’t give them up, he stated. Iran’s leaders would rather risk another war with the American president as opposed to capitulating, which, he added, “could be the beginning of the end of a regime that’s already on its way out.”

Iranian media has recently pointed out that the US has other interests in the region other than just the military. There are billions of dollars’ worth of commercial American interests in energy infrastructure and tourism. “This is the level of fear that the region has” regarding a war on their borders, he said.

In response to a question about the likelihood of a coup by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Vatanka said he didn’t see “much point” in an IRGC coup while the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is alive. “The IRGC is pretty much running the show,” and has been for a longtime. “Khamenei is in no position to pick a fight with the one force he has invested so much in protecting for decades.”

Azizi agreed that the Islamic Republic is not seeking a war with the United States “for obvious reasons because the disparity is quite obvious and they know it would be destructive and put their existence into serious question.”

In the Iranians’ view, however, the 12-day war in June has not ended, he argued. “It has just shifted from one theatre to another – from military to economic to psychological and now potentially back to military.” This is important, Azizi said, because the Islamic Republic’s “concept of readiness means survivability plus retaliation capacity, so these two indicators are the ones we need to look at in order to judge whether the Islamic Republic is ready or not.”

All the messaging and movements on the ground on the Iranian side point to the direction of survivability and retaliation capacity, he continued. The Iranians know that they do not have the ability to defeat the United States in conventional terms.

The likelihood of a naval blockade is important as the US moves aircraft carriers to the region along with Iran’s retaliatory threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz, he said. “A formal blockade, I think, is still unlikely because it would be a high threshold act – effectively an act of war. The more plausible scenario would be a kind of maritime [pressure campaign] not a formal blockade.”

The Islamic Republic’s current crisis environment points to some fractures or signs of stress. “It’s about the stress and the pressure the system is feeling,” he said. “Iran’s reaction is in response to President Trump’s deliberate ambiguity about attacking it.”

Azizi cautioned that the human costs of a US war on Iran should not be forgotten, and that “no one is convinced on the day after there would be a stable strong Iran.”

(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)